Alan Sepinwall of The Star-Ledger writes about his recent tour of the “Dollhouse” set — guided by the creator Joss Whedon himself — in anticipation of the start of Season 2 in late September.

The articles gives us a lot to look forward to — as well as a reminder to catch the last unaired episode of Season 1 — which is critical to understanding Whedon’s expansion of the show’s mythology in the upcoming season.

But what’s most interesting is the way Whedon articulates the politics of art in the Age of Image:

Whedon talked about how he and Fox both felt the show would be more accessible if they focused on standalone episodes built around Echo’s missions. But both he and the network realized after a while that those simply weren’t working, and that the audience was more invested in the ongoing stories of the characters in the Dollhouse.

“(Fox) saw that when we liked it (ongoing storylines), everybody liked it, so they liked it. So they stopped going, ‘Let’s try this, let’s try that.’ They said, ‘You do your thing, it’s not for everyone, but the people who love it, love it hard.’”

If Fox can come to see the value of a serial story, we might be getting somewhere.

In an article published in PopPolitics magazine, Sarah Yahm ponders why the reincarnated “Battlestar Galactica,” a show that consistently raised complex and challenging questions over its four seasons, decided to fall back on pat answers in its devastatingly reactionary series finale:

Frederick Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, argues that pop culture consistently provides us with interesting rich alternatives to the status quo and then in the end rejects them. We can escape into alternate (even at times radical) possibilities without actually having to challenge our own cultural system. Because of pop culture, we can go to Oz while simultaneously renewing our commitment to not leave Kansas.

I know I wasn’t alone in hoping that “Battlestar Galactica” was going to break that pattern. Throughout the past four seasons, “Battlestar” has consistently raised rigorous questions about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the importance of community, the definition of family, and the correct relationship between humans and technology.

I had faith the writers were going to resolve these questions in the only way possible — by not resolving them at all and instead forcing us to continue to grapple with them alone. They weren’t going to raise questions and then give us pat answers, I insisted. Frederick Jameson was one smart cookie but he was wrong about “Battlestar.”

But sadly, Jameson was right once again, because Ron Moore gave us some really pat answers. He retreated to an old but faithful amalgam –- the purity of nature, monotheism, the sanctity of traditional hetero families, and, yikes, colonial expansion

Continue reading “Is Lee Adama the New (And Not So Improved) Thomas Jefferson?  Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale.”

It feels like Christmas morning for sci-fans tonight. Guests are arriving in a few minutes for our Battlestar Galactica finale party. They are bringing their own concoction of neon green ambrosia.

Okay, we’ve just entered a deeper concentric circle of geekdom, didn’t we?

Well, like Christmas, we will soon be experiencing withdrawal, a wave of sadness as we realize the party is over.  But we’ll also be left with a great gift — a sci-fi series that, at its best, had the guts to reflect, on an individual and geo-political level, the complications of life.

We’ve talked a lot about Battlestar over the years at PopPolitics– especially the power of its allegory of a post 9/11 world order.  No need to rehash it here.

But it’s nice to hear that this past Tuesday there was a Battlestar summit of sorts at the UN.  In fact, it’s stunning.  Rarely does a complex allegory like Battlestar have to opportunity to make such a direct impact on its time.

Mary McDonnell, who plays President Laura Roslin, explained the show’s simple but profound goal:

“People who are taking these actions — that are unacceptable — are sometimes in positions where they don’t see the solution,” she says. “The experience of that is what we wanted to expose to our audience.”

McDonnell hopes that dramatizing the way decent leaders can come to wrong decisions intough situations will create more of a dialogue about other ways to use power.

Writing for NPR, Lara Pelligrinelli then wonders what that dialogue might look like:

Although debates about terrorism and human rights have receded to the background for many Americans, Battlestar Galactica may help the U.N. meet the challenge of reaching a broader audience.

Naimah Hakim, a 16-year-old sophomore from Westchester, was one of a hundred New York high-school students in attendance. To her, the show brings home issues in a way that most of her classroom lessons don’t.

“When you’re watching the show, you don’t question why you have to learn it,” she says. “You understand because it’s something that hits the nail on the head.”

Funny how a multi-layered allegory can help us see so clearly.

I’m still watching Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse,” and I’m becoming mildly intrigued. Television reviewers had only been given episodes 1-3 when they made their initial, mixed at best, reviews of the series. I wanted to wait until I got through episode 4 before I starting making any pronouncements.

So now here’s a tepid one. The story has great potential as an allegory for women struggling for agency in a increasingly subtle patriarchal world, but it is fulfilling that potential at a snail’s pace. And the feminist themes are being continually undermined by the marketing of its star, Eliza Dushku, who recently posed on the cover of Maxim.

I don’t agree with Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker that the “primary qualification Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage.” In fact, I could easily see her growing into the role or the role growing into her.

Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.

Franklin misses the point when she continues to say, “In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and ‘feminine’: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips.”

She is that way because the operators of the Dollhouse — and their clients — want her that way. By exposing this gendered system, the show can — potentially — undermine it. But Whedon is clearly walking a fine line here, and when The New Yorker doesn’t get it, you might need to make access to the allegory a bit clearer.

And you might want to have a word with Fox and Dushku herself about the messages they are sending off-screen (or at least outside the narrative of the show).

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Part of me rolls my eyes, and another part of me cringes when I contemplate the premise of “Dollhouse,” Joss Whedon’s new television series for Fox which premieres tonight. Joy Press at Salon sums up the premise of the show:

It stars former “Buffy” star Eliza Dushku as Echo, a young woman — known on the show as an “Active” or “Doll” — sapped of her memories and free will, who is sold to rich clients to fulfill their needs and fantasies. For each assignment she is imprinted with a fresh personality, complete with new skills, intelligence and neurological information; sometimes she morphs into a sexbot, other times she takes on the life of a highly methodical negotiator. Echo and her fellow Actives live in a giant Zen loft called the Dollhouse, blissfully unaware that they are being remote controlled by a shadowy organization.

It sounds like a science-fiction extension of Law and Order: SVU. Do we really need another show where women = victim — and she looks sexy while she’s being exploited/manipulated/killed?

Even if we see this new show’s lineage more in shows like Charlie’s Angels or Alias, that doesn’t feel any more promising. In some ways, these types of shows are more insidious, purporting to revel in female empowerment and agency while really just exposing how television executives can’t imagine a powerful woman who isn’t a cartoonish, supermodel superhero.

Fox’s marketing of “Dollhouse,” moreover, seems to revel in all of my fears. In combination with their “Terminator” series, Fox decides to evoke 70s sexploitation films as it points out that “Friday’s Got Grindhouse,” starring the “Dames of Deception.” It might be a light-hearted parody, but the satire has no point other than to emphasize that you can “Double Your Pleasure” with women who are “Hotter than Hades.”

In this context, it should come as no surprise that …. I cannot wait to watch the “Dollhouse” premiere.

There’s a new Joss Whedon show on television! Hallelujah!

If you are not familiar with Whedon’s work already, here’s just two things you need to know:

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Yes, stories of the future matter.  The best science fiction, as I’ve said before, is an allegory for our present-day world.

So I think it’s extremely cool that the folks over at i09 have asked a variety of well-known pundits what science fiction texts are must-reads when considering the imminent choice for president.

I would rather they asked science fiction authors or science fiction scholars, to be honest, but the responses they got actually resurrected — for a fleeting moment — my faith in punditry.

Kos, for example, goes classic with Asimov, but Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit chooses one of my new favorites, Vernor Vinge.

The list is more than just a set of recommendations, though.  The real treat is to hear why each pundit considers their text “good election-season material.”  Take Amanda Marcotte’s justification of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale:

It probably sounds a little trite since it gets referenced so much, but in light of the promotion of a true-believer fundamentalist to a national ticket, I have to recommend Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not just because it’s a dystopia that shows what America would be like under a Christian theocracy, but also because the book brilliantly skewers other aspects of the right-wing culture. You have the female misogynist Serena Joy that finds out the hard way that she isn’t exempt from the category ‘woman’ just because she was a stalwart soldier for the far right. You also are reminded that the conservative men who carry on about sexual morality in public all too often have their own closet full of secrets. The book is a reminder that right wing politics isn’t so much about ‘values’, but about power and control.

From the opposite side of the political spectrum, Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online actually wins big points for choosing an episode of Joss Whedon’s Angel, but unbelievably twists it into a warning that Obama’s calls for bi-partisanship are part of an evil totalitarian plot.  Really.

If I were asked, I would have a difficult time choosing — but I might go with Octavia Butler’s Dawn — which, more than any text I know, describes the difficulty of coalition-building and the special qualities a true leader must have to bring divergent factions together.

As a bonus, in its look at relations between humans and an intriguing but incredibly alien alien race, it reminds us of what a sensitive, peace-focused foreign policy might look like.

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how the underappreciated “Mimic” trilogy of sci-fi horror films has a lot to say about postmodern America:

The other day, I found an October 2007 story by R. Colin Johnson on the EETimes Web site that sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: “Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance.” According to the article:

Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its ‘”HI-MEMS” program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS — a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) — aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry. … The final milestone … will be flying a cyborg insect to within five meters of a specific target located some one hundred meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test successfully, then Darpa will probably begin breeding in earnest. Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors — video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more — could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

Not surprisingly, the article cites this project’s origin as being rooted in science fiction:

This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called “Sparrowhawk,” in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. … In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more — all predicted by Easton’s 1990 book.

While privacy rights issues are discussed in the context of a techno-insect world, the later half of the article reassures the reader that Darpa’s plan has more than a few bugs in it. “If Darpa’s track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance,” it states. “Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful — at least in the way they were originally imagined.”

Reading this piece reminded me of the “Mimic” trilogy, a series of science fiction/horror films that began on the big screen in 1997 and was followed by two direct-to-DVD sequels. All three movies were loosely inspired by a short story of the same name that was written by Donald A. Wolheim in 1942. The central premises of the “Mimic” trilogy — humanity biologically manipulating organisms for explicitly human purposes and technologically altered insects infiltrating human populations unnoticed — are similar to Darpa’s cyborg bug project and other projects that focus on genetic engineering.

This article examines the “Mimic” films, particularly how the plot device of the “Big Bug” monster is still relevant to public discourse on scientific issues. In particular, concepts and issues that are specific to genetic research and their related environmental and political impacts permeate the “Mimic” films, thus making them different from their irradiated Atomic Age predecessors and worthy of unique consideration.

Continue reading “Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the “Mimic” Trilogy.”

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how critically discarded “versus” horror films can tell us a great deal about how we see conflict in the post-9/11 world.

Horror is like any other genre of film: The most popular titles of a given era often gain their notoriety by striking a chord in audiences that is somehow related to the collective fears and hopes of that particular time. Along those lines, when critics associate horror films with modern social and political fears in post-9/11 America, they usually cite films of an apocalyptic nature: films that portray a community (or the entire world itself) as irrevocably unraveling at lightening speed at the hands of a monstrosity that is equal parts unexplainable, unstoppable and unavoidable.

Films released during the last several years such as “The Host“; “Sunshine“; “28 Weeks Later“; “Right at Your Door“; “Cloverfield“; “Land of the Dead“; and “Diary of the Dead” fit this trend. So do recent remakes such as “Dawn of the Dead,” and literary adaptations such as “War of the Worlds“; “30 Days of Night“; “I Am Legend“; and “The Mist.” These are akin to earlier films such as “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) that reflected the public’s fears of atomic weapons and communism back in the 1950s.

There is another kind of horror film that complements and yet contrasts this end-of-the-world sub-genre of horror, a kind of horror film that most critics dismiss. Unlike many of the apocalyptic films, these films do not so much depict a supreme battle between good and evil, but instead plague their characters with nothing but damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t choices.

Fears of vicious attacks and random massacres are not the product of some aberration of the natural order but an honest reflection of how the universe actually works. Thus, fears of this type of world do not center on vanquishing monsters to save others so much as on just surviving in a pre-determined situation. What kind of horror film is this? The crossover film that has the word “versus” in the title — namely, “Freddy vs. Jason” (2003), “Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and the recent “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007).

Continue reading “A Look at Iconic Versus: The Post-9/11 Significance of the Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator Movies.”

So I dropped in on the new TV series based on the “Terminator” movie franchise: “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” And the usual lowest-common-denominator limitations of broadcast TV are certainly present. Everyone is “hot” (even the freaky and geeky kids at John Connor’s high school) — and many of the characters feel trapped in stilted, predictable dialogue.

Despite these shortcomings, however, the ideas that motivate the narrative are so compelling that they more than make up for the sloppy execution — at least for now. Sure, the TV series and movie franchise use well-worn science fiction tropes — from time travel to machines becoming conscious and rebelling against their creators. But they make them fresh in such a way that both the movies and the TV show are more about the instability of modern identity than a more primal fear of technology. They deftly explore what makes us human and what human qualities might become our collective downfall.

It helps, of course, when explorations of identity aren’t afraid to present a realistic portrait of men and women. Unfortunately, as many critics have been pointing out, the waifish actress Lena Headey in the TV series isn’t very believable as Sarah Connor — who, as portrayed by a well-built Linda Hamilton in the movies, has gained a gritty, muscular physique over the years as she has constructed a guerrilla resistance force of sorts aimed at dismantling the machines that will otherwise lead to the apocalypse.

Check out the comparison pictures here. The PR shot of Headey handling a gun, especially when juxtaposed with an action shot of Linda Hamilton in T2, is particularly disturbing — echoing a phallic fetishization of women and guns that makes it look like an ad in Soldier of Fortune.

As members of the Sarah Connor Charm School and other feminists have noted, Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of Sarah Connor was an iconic inspiration for many women who rebel against the dangerous and debilitating standard of beauty in American culture. Unfortunately, when put in the context of images of women in music, magazines, advertising, TV, films and elsewhere that have come to dominate the cultural landscape in the last couple of decades — a virtual body image apocalypse, you might say — she feels like the last real woman we’ve seen.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought it rather weird that in between two of the usual thumbs-up reviews in a recent newspaper ad for the “Golden Compass” was a glowing review from … the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

“The Golden Compass” Is An Exciting Adventure Story, Entirely In Harmony With Catholic Teaching.

This is not a joke.

Considering the controversy surrounding the film’s release, it should be an encouraging sign for the Conference of Catholic Bishops to make such an unequivocal stand. But as one looks more closely at their full review, it becomes clear that they appreciate the film precisely because it has excised the theological complexity of Phillip Pullman’s novel:

The good news is that the first book’s explicit references to this church have been completely excised with only the term Magisterium retained. The choice is still a bit unfortunate, however, as the word refers so specifically to the church’s teaching authority. Yet the film’s only clue that the Magisterium is a religious body comes in the form of the icons which decorate one of their local headquarters …. Whatever author Pullman’s putative motives in writing the story, writer-director Chris Weitz’s film, taken purely on its own cinematic terms, can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with, at its core, a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism.

This back-handed compliment of a review brings me back to Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian who I previously noted defended the film as deeply spiritual.

Freitas, in a recent essay on Salon, argues that the continuing uproar over the film (calls for banning the entire “Dark Materials” trilogy from Catholic libraries, for example) — far from scaring Catholics away from the story — will scare them away from Catholicism itself:

Who is really endangered by all this Pullman hysteria? I worry that the species actually at risk of losing their faith as a result of all the mud being slung about Pullman’s exquisite rereading of the biblical book of Genesis are those Catholics who have read the trilogy and adored it, or (God forbid) had already given it to their kids. I worry that these lovers of great literature now feel like they sit on a dirty little secret that, if revealed, might make them persona non grata in the Catholic world they call home. But, since when are believers supposed to choose between their faith and their imagination? Between the joy of reading and the joy of sects?

As Freitas goes on to explain how her Catholicism, steeped in feminism and liberation theology, is able to see and find inspiration from Pullman’s vision, you can’t help but want the old Catholic guard to get back in touch with their inner child.

Adults don’t get it.

As I look at all the hullaballoo over the new “The Golden Compass” movie (based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials“), I am reminded of the Ursula Le Guin pro-fantasy manifesto: “Why Are Americans So Afraid of Dragons?”

In that 1974 essay, Le Guin indicts a general cultural conservatism that sees the freedom and imagination inherent in fantasy literature as a threat, even as American children’s appetite for it seems to be insatiable.

That conservatism apparently still holds some sway today, even if it didn’t mind co-opting C.S. Lewis’ Narnia as a straightforward Christian allegory (which, I’ve argued before, distorts that wonderfully complex world). Conservative Christian groups of many colors are calling for a boycott of the newest potential fantasy juggernaut.

The best response I’ve read so far comes from an unexpected source: a Catholic theologian. Donna Freitas writes in the Boston Globe:

These books are deeply theological, and deeply Christian in their theology. The universe of “His Dark Materials” is permeated by a God in love with creation, who watches out for the meekest of all beings — the poor, the marginalized, and the lost. It is a God who yearns to be loved through our respect for the body, the earth, and through our lives in the here and now. This is a rejection of the more classical notion of a detached, transcendent God, but I am a Catholic theologian, and reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.

The book’s concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman’s work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman’s work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman’s work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.

When someone like Freitas so clearly exposes the true motives behind all the fear-mongering, it makes our job easy.

Our latest pop culture round-up is up at the Britannica Blog.

It includes some new commentary on Hollywood’s version of Jane Austen, the influential yet controversial legacy of “American Bandstand,” and Hallmark’s latest cultural appropriation — an example of which is featured here.

You can also check out my other post on the world’s largest music lesson — which I witnessed first-hand Tuesday night. Nothing like seeing close to 1400 guitarists strumming Woody Guthrie.

Even more than “John from Cincinnati” and “Mad Men,” “The 4400” (Sundays on USA) is lost in its corner of the new niche-driven television universe. It’s a true serial show — science fiction to boot — that requires regular viewing to understand and appreciate its ambition and nuance. Critics have all but ignored it through its three and a half seasons.

Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) in “The 4400″

But it survives and thrives — another testimony to the emergence of a new golden age of television. Just when we thought image was everything, quality and substance matter.

And “The 4400″ has plenty of substance. It’s almost impossible to summarize. If you do get inspired to give it a try, you want to start at the start.

It begins with 4400 missing persons returning after absences ranging from many decades to just a few years. We learn rather quickly that they have been sent from back from the future — and they all have special abilities.

But instead of resting on that premise, it builds on it — taking endless twists and turns. It deals with the big questions — the nature of religion, the fear of difference, the tension between order and freedom — as well as the most intimate moments, such as the love and pain of parents of an autistic child.

While the acting of and writing for some of its lead characters falter at times — it more than makes up for it with fully realized performances from quirky side characters and a week-to-week originality that rivals “The Twilight Zone.” And I don’t make that comparison lightly.

That originality, moreover, is always at the service of a larger story. Very few, if any, episodes are entirely self-contained. In this sense, it has the same structural dynamic as the “X-Files” at its pre-campy best and “Star Trek:The Next Generation” during its final, marvelous years.

With both of those series it also shares strong, no-nonsense women — and an awareness of how Western society always constructs an (alien) Other on which it projects its own anger and anxieties.

The folks at TV Squad are doing the best job right now of tracking show’s many allusions and allegorical possibilities.

Time to join them.

Matt Weiner describes his new show, “Mad Men” (Thursdays on AMC), as “science fiction” — but in the past. What he means is that, just as science fiction often uses a future world to say things about the present you can’t say directly (it’s both figuratively and literally ahead of its time), his show uses the overtly sexist and racist atmosphere of a 1960 New York advertising office to talk about issues that persist today but we are too “polite” (to use the words of Alan Taylor, one of the show’s directors) to talk about openly.

Don Draper (Joe Hamm) advises Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss)

To say this strategy is brilliant is an understatement. As you watch the show, you feel like you are peeking under someone’s bed, into their medicine cabinets and their closets … and through their dirty laundry, for good measure. You can’t believe that he or she wants you to be seeing all this stuff — but there they are, flouting it loudly and unabashedly in front of your face.

As the viewer, you sense that the people you are observing are larger than life — their world is a microcosm of America. But you also understand instinctually that it’s not America of some hazy past, but the America you live in.

This use of an allegorical past is not completely new. Most famously Arthur Miller employed it in “The Crucible,” in which he used the Salem Witch Trials to talk about the McCarthy Era. And as I’ve mentioned before, David Milch has used it in “Deadwood” to expose the continuing “treachery” of American capitalism.

But for Miller, Milch and others, the trick was showing that the past was just as bad as the present — giving historical context to a contemporary nightmare. In “Mad Men,” Weiner is doing somewhat of the opposite — revealing that the present is just as bad as the past. Unlike the McCarthy Era, we live in a time of innocence, believing we have overcome much of the sexism and racism in which the characters in “Mad Men” revel.

The advertising world is the perfect setting for Weiner to make the connections between the present and the past. The postmodern world — in which image is everything and “reality” is tough to see through all the social construction — is very much the product of American marketers in the latter half of the 20th Century.

In a revealing scene during Episode 2, advertising executive and reticent war hero Don Draper (played by Joe Hamm) tells Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) over cocktails: “You?re born alone, and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget.”

Menken asks if he’s ever been in love.

“What you call love,” says Draper, “was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”

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I couldn’t be more excited that the creators of “Battlestar Galactica” are not going to make us wait until next January to get our interstellar fix. Even though the final season won’t be airing until next year, they’ve just announced that a two-part TV movie will air in November (thanks, Fandom, for keeping us in the loop)

Rear Admiral Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes) in command of the Pegasus in “Battlestar Galactica”

If you are not familar with the show, you should be. We’ve certainly talked it up plenty at PopPolitics.

And you don’t have to be a big science fiction fan to enjoy it — because at its core it’s a great story that resonates deeply in our present-day world. As a piece of visual literature, it’s full of well-written, complex characters in continuously compromising situations. And as a gripping allegory, it holds up a cracked mirror to our contemporary political and social life — specifically, the post-9/11 culture of fear, the Bush doctrine and the Iraq War.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this recent analysis of the resurgence of science fiction and fantasy by Gareth McClean in the Guardian. He argues that “Battlestar Galactica,” with the help of shows like “Firefly” and “Lost,” is responsible for making the genre more relevant than it’s been since, well, its Golden Age.

He begins the piece, in fact, by speaking in awe-inspiring terms of Battlestar’s allegorical power:

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